


The Exchange Repercussion

by JurassicJosh



Series: Time Will Tell [1]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:06:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3509447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JurassicJosh/pseuds/JurassicJosh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the intense heat of Utah's desert, a man hikes through the cliffs and canyons, only to experience a curious but disturbing event, that leaves him shocked and very very confused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Exchange Repercussion

**Author's Note:**

> The Exchange Repercussion was written a little over a year ago, as of now, and there is no continuation of the series yet. It was originally going to be part of a much longer story called Time Will Tell (that may give you a clue as to what may have happened in this part). I did have something planned for future parts of this story, and I may still write more if I get enough positive feedback on this part. We will see. I am curious if any of you have theories as to what happened in this part, so if you do, please leave them in the comments.

     The sun was almost directly above my head now, sending an array of light and heat cascading down, making even the russet, rocky ground amorphous under it’s weight.  The dust swung in the wind like dry, floating surf.  The lack of water in the air parched my mouth and saturated even the sweat from my body.

     Such a lovely day.

     Dust and loose rocks shifted under my marred hiking shoes as I trudged up to the edge of a cliff, which dropped approximately three stories into a gorge with a dry, ephemeral river at the bottom.  The trails left over from the river, after past rainfalls, still showed the flow and current.  

     I stood as close as I dared to the edge of the drop off, and tilted brim of my fedora down to shade my eyes from the intense glare of the sun.  I stared out into the distance and my eyes did the traveling from there.  Layers upon layers of brilliant orange, sedimentary rock created buttes, mesas, and cliffs that jutted from the cracked and dusty ground, while gorges cut their way through the landscape like rips through a massive sheet of orange paper.  The rusty colors of the ground rose up to contrast with the rich blue of the sky.  

     I stood there for a while, simply letting the immense scale of it all be fully comprehended by my brain.  Not even the horizon stopped its expanse.  You could almost convince yourself that the entire surface of the planet continued like this.  I had been here many times before, yet it still made me lose myself to pensive thoughts of the spectacular beauty of the world and of the power it must have required to be created.  

     I then noticed it was beginning to cloud over.  A small, wispy cloud glided along, riding on the winds like a small sailboat.  It was barely a smudge of white against the vast blue of the sky, and I smiled to myself.

     I unclipped a small, metal thermos bottle from my long cargo pants, which were coated in dust and gnarled at the bottoms.  The black metal was still cool in my hands as I unscrewed the lid.  I lifted the bottom of the bottle and let the ice cool water flow into my mouth, moistening my dry lips and rejuvenating my senses.

     With said rejuvenated senses, I noticed the position of the sun:  It was just after noon.  That meant I should probably head back to the car to retrieve my usual ham and cheese wrap for lunch.  

     I screwed the top back onto the thermos bottle, clipped it again to my pants’ loop, and turned away from the cliff.  I slid down the other side, shuffling my feet as I descended the rough, gravelly slope with a miniature rockslide following in my wake.  I skidded to a stop at the bottom, having created a large cloud of dust that billowed up from my feet.  I waited until the dust cloud cleared, for dramatic effect, before continuing the hike back to my car.

     For about a mile, I hiked over the hot, dusty terrain, with the breeze speckling me with dust and bits of rock, until I reached a pass between two huge cliff faces.  Giant boulders, some as big as a garage, had eroded from the tops of the two cliffs, and were now scattered across the pass in a jagged maze of crumbled stone.  Some called this place Ambush Alley because of its resemblance to places where cowboys were ambushed in western movies.  Additionally, it was a catchy name.

     I stopped, but I wasn't gawking at Ambush Alley, I was staring at the ground with a huge grin across my face.  Embedded in the dirt was a small, dust coated rock about the size of my thumb.  I could tell it wasn't a rock, though.

     I knelt in the dust and pulled out a small metal pick, about three inches long, from one of the pockets on my cargo vest.  I wedged it into the ground, right against the object, and used the pick like a crowbar to pry it from ground.  It popped out with a small puff of dust.  

     I placed the pick back in my pocket and carefully lifted the small object, caressing it between my fingers.  It was blue-grey in color and was dappled with patches of orange dirt.  There was a thin crack that circled about two thirds of it, but as I said, it wasn't a rock.  It was a fossilized clam.  

     Most people would ponder the possibilities of why someone would be as excited as I was about a very old, dead clam.  This was my passion, though.  Finding the creatures that have been lost to time, and making my own conclusions about how they lived; their ecologies.  In fact, that was my job.  I had to look at the past through the spectacle of what remains of it:  fossils.  

     I reached into another one of my pockets and pulled out a small, snack-size ziplock bag.  I carefully slid the clam into the bag, and blew some air in to give it some cussion, before placing it back in my pocket.

     I stood again, with my clam at my side, and began clambering my way through Ambush Alley.  Mostly, I just walked past the boulders, but every so often I decided to scramble over the top of one for a more adventurous inclination.

     I glanced up at the two cliffs to either side of me.  They were at their highest here in the middle of the pass, but it also seemed darker here as well.  

     I stopped.  The world had suddenly dimmed, like a cloud had just passed in front of the sun.  How was that possible?  The sky had been perfectly clear not long ago, except for the small smudge cloud, but there was no way that that cloud could have blocked out the sun like this.  In addition my body felt strange, like all the trace amounts of metals in my body were being pulled towards a high powered magnet.  I ran through about twenty explanations, none of which made sense, in approximately one second before deciding to pivot around and look at the sky.

     The sun was still there, toasting the planet with nothing to interfere.  I squinted, trying to see if I missed something, but there was nothing else to see.  Not even the smudge cloud was visible in the sky anymore, and there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the sun.  I spun back around and scanned my surroundings again.  It was still dim, but I noticed that the dust in the air seemed to be drifting out of the pass, like a cross breeze had suddenly formed.  The dust moved more like it was being pulled rather than pushed though.  Some of the sand and tinier rocks seemed to be shifting as well.

     Before I even had a chance to hypothesize about these occurrences, light coruscated and engulfed my entire vision, like a searchlight blazing into my pupils.  A wave of pain shot through my eyes as they constricted and, for a moment, I couldn't see a thing.

     My surroundings began to peak their way back into view from behind large, formless blobs that had burned into my eyes.  The blobs had just begun fading when a blast, like a sonic boom, impacted my eardrum, deafening me.  This wasn’t a regular sonic boom, though.  It seemed to have mass to it, and I felt the wave slam into my body and blast me to the ground in a huge dust cloud.

     My deafness was replaced by a painfully loud ringing, like I was standing inside a church bell, and despite my blurry, splotchy vision, I saw that the hypersonic boom had disrupted the stability of the two surrounding cliffs.  I watched painfully as the tops of the cliffs simply crumbled.  Huge rocks and boulders stampeded down the slopes toward me in two huge rock slides.

     Every part of me throbbed from my body slam with mother earth, but I managed to force myself up with enough force that I was already running before I even took my first step.  It felt like the contents of my stomach had spontaneously combusted, and the flames were now rising up into my chest.  Pain pulsed through my head, but the insides were still functioning and furiously trying to configure a plan in which I wouldn’t die.

     I had less than ten more seconds before the two rock slides converged in the middle of Ambush Alley, and thus, on me.  I was barely able to see, but I did catch a glimpse of a boulder, roughly midway between the two cliffs, through the blobs that still occupied most of my field of vision.  

     I dashed to the boulder in approximately four seconds.  It took roughly more one second to leap and grasp the top of it with just the tips of my fingers.  I pulled my elbow up for support, and managed to spasmodically lift myself up and flop onto the top of the boulder in an additional three seconds.

     I sat up and watched the rocks and boulders come barreling into the pass, converging in the middle and sending chips of rock and dust spiraling through the air like fireworks of rock that had exploded on the ground.  It probably sounded like that too, but it was hard to tell over the ringing that still engulfed my ears.  Some of the flying rocks pelted my head and back as I curled up on my island, trying to protect my face under my hat.

     The sound of crashing boulders began to stop.  I slowly lifted my head and rose to my feet.  Dust was billowing up from where the two rock slides had collided.  The entire pass was filled with boulders, rocks, and loose dirt.  Some rocks still shifted and tilted, trying to nestle into an open space.  It looked like the wreckage of a giant, dilapidated, building.  The ground where I had found the small clam was now completely covered.  If I hadn’t picked it up, it would have been lost forever to time.  

     I placed my hand on the pocket that contained the clam, making sure it was still intact.  I stood there for a while, my eyes wildly scanning the destruction.  The light was back to normal, I no longer felt the pulling sensation in my body, and the ringing was starting to subside.  My body still hurt, but my mind was too busy to process the pain.

     I couldn’t figure out what had just happened.  The desolation that was laid out before me and the disturbing, pulling sensation in my body brought only a single, unanswerable question to my mind:

_What could have done this?_

  
  


_Scan 001:  Burned notebook page recovered from wreckage of lab in Hanksville, UT, describing concept of equivalent exchange_


End file.
